Missionaries' Church Casts Net Wide

By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

Published: April 24, 2001

Calvary Church in Muskegon, Mich., which supported the missionary who was killed with her daughter in an attack by a Peruvian Air Force plane on Friday, is an ambitious place when it comes to supporting people to preach the Gospel far and wide.

Veronica Bowers and her husband, James, who survived the attack, were among 35 couples and 10 unmarried missionaries supported by the church, all working under the authority of missionary organizations that have sent them to places like Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Irian Jaya, said the Rev. Terry Fulk, the church's missions pastor.

But for Calvary, one of 1,400 churches affiliated with the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, the Bowerses were unique. Because they had a special need for a houseboat to carry out their mission in the Peruvian Amazon, the congregation built one for them.

''It was actually built in the barn of one of our church members,'' Mr. Fulk said. ''It had a couple of bedrooms in it, a living room, a pilot house and a kitchen area.''

After construction was completed, the church shipped the boat in sections to Iquitos, Peru. Equipped with two diesel engines, it served the Bowerses as a means to motor a 200-mile stretch of the Amazon, where they set up Bible study groups and established churches among 56 villages, he said.

''They were just infatuated with the Amazon,'' said Mr. Fulk, who noted, too, that Mr. Bowers grew up in that region, where his father had also worked as a missionary.

Mrs. Bowers, 35, and the couple's 7-month-old daughter, Charity, were killed after the Peruvian jet opened fire on the Cessna 138 in which the family was traveling. Mr. Bowers, 37, and their son, Cory, 6, survived by clinging to the burning wreckage of the plane after it was landed on the Amazon River. They returned to the United States on Sunday. The plane's pilot, Kevin Donaldson, was wounded in the legs, but also survived and was transported to a hospital in the United States for treatment.

The Bowerses worked for the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, in Harrisburg, Pa. Founded in 1927, it is a medium-size presence among the large number of American Protestant missionary organizations. Among this group, the biggest is the Southern Baptist Convention's International Missionary Board, with an annual budget of more than $257 million and a force of about 4,300 missionaries, each working for a term of two years or more. By contrast, the association has a budget of $23 million and fields 632 missionaries working for terms of four years or more, in addition to having a smaller number on shorter-term stints, according to the ''Mission Handbook'' (MARC, 1997).

The association works with Baptist churches of a strongly theologically conservative cast. John Greening, national representative of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, described it as fundamentalist in the historic Protestant sense -- ''a solid, evangelical, doctrinal position.''

Dr. Greening said the organization emphasized not just preaching and converting people in the many nations in which it worked, but also establishing churches and training local people to be their pastors.

In an interview yesterday, Michael G. Loftis, president of the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism Inc., said he did not consider missionary work in the Peruvian jungles to be any riskier than living in some American cities.

''I would say the chances are far higher in getting shot in an urban alley on one of the streets in America's big cities,'' he said, ''than it ever would be on the back river of the Amazon.''

Until last year, Sherry Boykin worked among the association's missionaries in the Peruvian Amazon, upriver from the Bowerses, whom she knew. Despite the hardships of being in a place where visitors had to take great precautions with water and food, living as a missionary on the upper Amazon was an experience of overwhelming spiritual reward, she said.

''There are very few things in the world you can do and know without any doubt you are in the will of the Lord,'' said Mrs. Boykin, who is married to a professor at Baptist Bible College in Clarks Summit, Pa. She read aloud a passage from the Bible, Matthew 28:18-20, in which the resurrected Jesus commands his followers to ''go and make disciples'' in all nations. ''We take that seriously, and it does not feel like a drudgery,'' she said.